Kombo
Traditional kingdom of Gambia
Kombo or Combo was a kingdom and later a chieftaincy in Gambia during the colonial period. Kombo was part of the Mali Empire and gained independence after its fall, and was then ruled by the Sambou Bainunka clan. Mansa Karapha Yalli Jatta became the first King of Kombo, after seeking help from the then independent Kaabu Empire to establish the Kingdom of Kombo, he married the daughter of the Bainuk Queen Wullending Jasseh of Sanyang who sits at Gunjur and took her to Busumbala. Mansa Karapha Yalli Jatta was from the Jatta (Lion) clan who claim ancestry from Sundiata Keita the first Emperor of the Mali Empire. Kombo was ruled by two families, the Jatta (Djatta) and Bojang (Bodian) clans, when one clan becomes Mansa, the other clan gets to choose the crown prince from their own clan and vice versa. From 1840-1855 Mansa Suling Jatta was the King of Kombo, he was killed in the Soninke-Marabout war, and most of the Jatta clan moved to other regions.
“Kombo” enters the record as traditional kingdom of Gambia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kombo, Traditional and kingdom can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 28, 2025. The first chronological checks are 1840 and 1855.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kombo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.